OK, I guess I have taken a long enough time off from posting. I'm starting back up with another Treasure Chest Thursday series.

This is a book that my maternal aunt has allowed me to scan. I used the Flip-Pal scanner that I received for Christmas from my husband to scan this book turned journal in which her grandmother and my great-grandmother, Emily Calhoun (Slemmons) Munday, kept notes. She died in 1936 in Metcalfe County, Kentucky. The material that is in here after that would have been added by my grandmother and her daughter-in-law, Gussie Otto (DeSpain) Munday.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

In 4 days this blog will be 2 years old and I am thinking, seriously thinking, about making a major change. While I haven't been blogging a lot lately, I am constantly thinking about new postings. Some of the reasons, but not all, that I do not get them done is the fact of having to create them in Blogger. I use Blogger in draft, but I have never really like the interfacing that Blogger has.

Recently, I exported all of my postings from Blogger into a WordPress account that I had created. Initially, my intention was to keep this new account private, so that it wouldn't get confused with this one and just for backing this one up. The "just in case" scenario, so that I would have this blog backed up, somewhere.

However, now that I have played with the WordPress interface, I like it. Just a few of the things that I have found really cool in WordPress: You can preview a new theme and it will actually show you what your blog would look with this new theme in place. I like the fact that it has not only a spell checker, but a grammar checker and style rules. Because, I know better then anybody how much help my writing needs! ;)

But there are several reasons why I don't want to stop using Blogger.

1st - because of all of you, my followers. I really don't want to lose any of you. I know with a move some followers will be lost, that's a normal thing.

2nd - I would have to update everything and everybody. Facebook, Geneabloggers, Google+, LinkedIn, etc, etc.

3rd - It seems to me that I am abandoning something that I started with for the new toy. Plus I really like all of the other Google products that I use on a daily basis. Why should I drop this one?

4th - The subscribing to a WordPress blog seems to have more steps involved. It could just be me thinking or not remembering what it took to subscribe to a Blogger blog in the beginning.

So, what is my real question here? What do you all think? Should I move the blog? Is it easier to subscribe or follow one or the other?

Please let me know what you guys think. I know if I decide to do it, I won't do it overnight it will probably take me a while to work up the nerve or have the wild hair that finally gives me the courage to do it. But I really would like to know what have been your experiences or thoughts on this.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

I signed the Records Preservation and Access Committee's petition to stop fraudulent tax refund claims. Have you? If you haven't why not? As of this posting there are only 1095 signers. Unfortunately, we need to get 25,000 by March 8th, 2012. You might be asking, Why should you sign this petition?

{climbing up on her soapbox}

I'm not going to pretend that I understand everything about the situation, but what I do understand is this: Some bad people, we'll call them criminals, decided to use a dead person's social security number on their tax return, so that they can claim more dependents on their tax form then they are entitled to. Rather than the government making the IRS use a computer program that would red-flag this tax return as, "Hey, this Social Security number is for a dead person!", they want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and shut down the online index......Brilliant! I mean they make apps for everything, why haven't they made an app for this? Can't someone's 14 year old grandchild come up with the coding to do this?

If we, as concerned citizens and genealogist, don't voice our opinions on this petition, we will sit by as the Government shuts down a perfectly good system rather than fixing the real problem of not making the IRS do its job....the correct way.

How do you sign the petition? Go to the Petition's page on the White House website at http://wh.gov/khE
You will need to create a user in order to sign the petition, which is probably whey there are so few people who have signed so far.

Please take the time to sign this petition and get all of your family members, neighbors, clients, business associates and everyone else you stop on the street to sign it too!